by Sam Willis
Lieutenant Thomas Duval carried the news to India
The Lightning Conductor
If you were a successful admiral in the age of sail, where would you keep your medals, your paintings, your battle relics and souvenirs? Nelson, in classic Nelsonian style, kept them everywhere. One visitor to his home at Merton in Surrey, where Nelson moved in 1801, remembered how ‘ … not only the rooms but the whole house, staircase and all’1 were covered with images of the admiral and littered with naval memorabilia. We know that he kept one of his most curious pieces in the hallway, so that it was the very first thing that a visitor would see, or crack their shins against, when they came to Merton. That item was the lightning conductor of the French 120-gun flagship L’Orient which exploded at the Battle of the Nile. Its place in such a prominent position was a clear indication of Nelson’s pride in or fascination with it, a fact that bears a little consideration.
The lightning conductor is quite splendid and you can still see it at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. Over a metre tall, its lower half consists of a conical piece of black painted wood through the centre of which runs a sheave for a signal halyard. Resting on top is a painted metal cap to which is attached a lengthy piece of cylindrical copper, turned at the head like a bishop’s crook. It looks like the fantastic contraption of a mad scientist, something that might have fallen off Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (fig. 10).
The allure of this artefact is considerable on a number of levels. First and most obviously, it came from the flagship of Rear-Admiral François-Paul Brueys, whose fleet was annihilated at Aboukir Bay and whose flagship was destroyed in the process by a cataclysmic explosion. It is therefore important both because it came from the French flagship and also because it was one of its few recognisable pieces to have survived.7 This small object evokes the great shadowy mass of the warship that was destroyed, acting as a reminder of the incredible destructive power that Nelson brought down on the French fleet at Aboukir Bay, a fleet that was shattered as utterly as the flagship itself.
On another level, however, the artefact is important because it is a lightning conductor and the history of lightning conductors is rather interesting. Lightning strikes were always hot news in the late 18th century. In the weeks before the Battle of the Nile, strikes on Caldecot Church in Rutland and Grantham Church in Lincolnshire both made the news.2 Strikes on churches were common because of the height of their steeples, which often towered above surrounding trees; Grantham’s spire is 282 ft high. Ships were particularly vulnerable because there was nothing at sea to attract the lightning in the way that woods, hills and mountains protected houses on land. Wooden hulls, moreover, did nothing to conduct electricity safely to the sea. The result was that unprotected wooden ships struck by lightning burst into flame, a major problem for all navies whose ships were crammed with mountains of gunpowder.
The solution, a copper bar extending from the masthead through the hull and into the sea, was developed simultaneously in Europe and America in the middle years of the 18th century, the American inventor being none other than Benjamin Franklin, who was a well-respected scientist long before he became a revolutionary politician and a Founding Father of the United States. Franklin’s idea was readily accepted and, by 1798, American ships had already been fitted with lightning conductors for many years. The French were slightly slower on the uptake but we know that the French scientist Jean-Baptiste le Roy toured the main naval dockyards of France in 1784, fixing copper lightning rods to ships and naval storehouses.
The British system, developed in 1762 by Dr William Watson, was significantly inferior because it was temporary and awkward. At times of suspected danger, a copper chain was rigged from the masthead, passed down through the rigging and dropped overboard. Once rigged, it got in the way of the masts, yards and sails, but the system’s main flaw was that it relied on the sailors, a naturally suspicious bunch, to find the copper chain and then rig it when most believed that installing a lightning rod actually increased the risk of being struck.3 As a result, British warships continued to suffer from lightning strikes and were hit as many as 174 times between 1793 and 1838. Those that did manage to rig the clumsy protection system found it wholly inadequate. It offered no protection against side-flashes because it was not bonded to nearby metal and the electricity would arc at the connecting links, which could easily melt.
Nelson’s French lightning conductor was important, therefore, because it was an example of effective maritime technology that the British did not then have and it became a focal point for discussions among naval professionals and interested parties. There is every reason to believe that it was influential. In 1799, a year after the Battle of the Nile, an important article on French lightning conductors was published in the very first edition of The Naval Chronicle, the new and very popular British magazine dedicated to all matters naval. Despite this contemporary interest, however, the inadequacy of the British system was never properly addressed until 1842, when a new and impressive solution which had been invented by William Snow Harris in 1820 was finally adopted for all British naval ships. The history of lightning conductors therefore provides a rare example of British lethargy in adopting technical innovation that could improve maritime capability. Snow Harris was only six when Nelson won his lightning conductor at the Nile. In the subsequent years during which L’Orient’s conductor sat next to Nelson’s boots and umbrellas at Merton, the science of maritime lightning protection remained a hot topic of debate.
On a more personal level, Nelson may well have cherished the artefact in his hallway as a reminder of the surprising, shockingly violent and merciless assault that he had launched on the French fleet at Aboukir Bay, an assault which was the very human embodiment of a lightning strike. Perhaps he appreciated the incongruity of its survival: the French may have been protected from nature’s wrath, but they had nothing to protect them from the British.
The Prey
By 1798 four years had passed since the Jacobins had ruled France through The Terror and the Brest fleet had been shattered by Howe on The Glorious First of June. The extremism of the Jacobins had finally been tamed by the Thermidorian coup, yet many serious problems created by the way the French navy was organised, run, perceived and used still remained. The Jacobins had been replaced by the chaotic Directory which enjoyed the period of relative peace that had been won by the initial surge of the powerful revolutionary armies. The First Coalition against the Republic had been broken and the threats to French soil beaten back. French territory had then been expanded, notably in Italy where the young and aggressive Bonaparte had repeatedly defeated the Austrian armies before marching to within 100 miles of Vienna. The Austrians had crumbled and Napoleon had ruled his conquered territory as nothing less than a personal fiefdom. During this period of French victories on foreign soil, the politicians in Paris became more moderate. Peace negotiations were begun with Britain and some even spoke of reinstating the French monarchy.
Nothing could have been less attractive to men like Bonaparte and his great rival General Lazare Hoche who used their military power to back a coup on 18 Fructidor (4 September) 1797. The new government was notably more aggressive in its foreign policy and also grateful to the men who had brought it to power. However, Hoche died shortly after the coup, leaving Napoleon the principal military beneficiary of political favour. When he suggested an attack on British interests in India via an invasion of the Egyptian territories of the crumbling Ottoman Empire, the politicians seized the opportunity to send a popular and powerful general away from Paris and to occupy thousands of listless French troops brooding after their victories in Lombardy. Thus it was that Napoleon began to gather an invasion fleet of extraordinary proportions in ports all along the Mediterranean coast of France and Italy.
The man he placed in command of the fleet was Vice-Admiral François-Paul Brueys D’Aigalliers, an aristocratic officer who had survived the surrender of the fleet in Toulon in 1793 and the subsequent Jacobin death squ
ads in the city. Compared with Villaret, the green commander of the French fleet at The Glorious First of June, Brueys was very experienced. He had cut his teeth in numerous fleet battles during the American War and had been present at the great Battle of the Chesapeake of 1781 when the British fleet had been effectively neutralised by skilled French manoeuvre. More importantly for our understanding of the Battle of the Nile, Brueys had also fought at St Kitts in 1782 when Samuel Hood had so cleverly demonstrated the potential strength of a well-defended line of anchored ships. With his ships well anchored close to each other and close to shore and with springs running to the anchor cables to allow the captains to change the direction of their ships’ broadsides without setting sail, Hood had been able to protect his anchorage from persistent French attacks. He had then vanished during the night in a flawless demonstration of tactical acuity and magnificent seamanship. At the Nile Brueys would find out how well he had learned the detail of Hood’s tactical lesson.
The assembly of Napoleon’s invasion army in 1798 was a notable logistical achievement, but the fighting ships chosen to protect the cumbersome troop transports still lacked skilled seamen, although the situation was not quite as bleak as it had been in the tumultuous early years of the war. The end of The Terror had led to the return of some of the experienced, aristocratic officers who had fled or been expelled from the Navy under the Jacobins and the corps of seamen-gunners, which had been abolished just before The Glorious First of June, had been reinstated. Nothing, however, had been done to reform the underlying problems of the French manning system or to ease the painful effects of The Glorious First of June. Then 4,200 French sailors had died, 3,300 had been wounded and between 4,000 and 5,000 had been taken prisoner, many of whom had subsequently died of typhus in British prisons or in the holds of British ships.
With insufficient space on Napoleon’s transports, the ‘escorting’ warships were also crammed with supernumeraries including an army of soldiers to wage the war, a chaos of children to found a colony and a ponder of philosophers to examine Egypt’s treasures. Rather than a fighting squadron patrolling, the French fleet had become a substantial city relocating. It would have been torn apart if intercepted by a British fleet and what a strike that would have been. Not only was Napoleon on board L’Orient, lounging in an ostentatious luxury that shocked many who witnessed it, but with him were Louis Alexandre Berthier, August de Marmont, Jean Lannes, Joachim Murat, Louis Desaix, Jean Reynier, Antoine-François Andréossy, Jean-Andoche Junot, Louis-Nicolas Davout and Alexandre Dumas, the core group of generals and marshals which, in the coming years, would expand and defend Napoleon’s empire.
On only a handful of occasions in history has the fate of an empire and of hundreds of thousands of lives rested on such a perilous venture. Napoleon’s encumbered and poorly manned fleet would have been vulnerable to any respectable naval force. But the man who had been sent to hunt it down was Rear-Admiral Horatio Nelson and he led one of the finest squadrons that had ever sailed the seas.
The Favourite
Nelson was not particularly short8 but he was notably frail. His complexion had been affected by the malaria and yellow fever he had suffered as a young man and, by the time he was put in command of the squadron sent to hunt down Napoleon’s invasion fleet, he had one arm, was blind in one eye and suffered recurrently from the huge ‘fist-sized’ hernia caused by the wound he received at the Battle of St Vincent. The contrast between that physical frailty and his mental courage was an important reason why he was loved by his men, but so too was his clear fondness for them. He did not love without qualification, nor did he love without exception, but Nelson loved enough, and he made his dedication sufficiently apparent for most to love him back. His dedication to destroying the enemy, moreover, even if it was tangled up with a desire for personal glory, was contagious among men trained to fight.
By 1797 he had tasted failure as much as success. He had taken part in a disastrous campaign in the Turks Islands in the West Indies in 1783 and then in the famous calamity at Santa Cruz in the Canaries in 1797. He had enjoyed success in Corsica in 1794, in a single-ship engagement the following year and then most famously at the Battle of St Vincent in 1797, but by no means everything he touched turned to gold. He had, indeed, very nearly lost his life in battle on several occasions, often as a result of his own rashness, but his natural ability to lead was as clear to his naval superiors and political masters as it was to his subordinates. Men followed Nelson and men wanted to follow Nelson. His peculiar charm, which certainly did not work on everyone he met, worked on enough influential men to radically change his destiny.
That was why Nelson was chosen above so many others in 1798 to lead a squadron into the Mediterranean and track down Napoleon’s fleet. Make no mistake of how extraordinary this selection was. Officers promoted to flag rank were put on a list of flag-officers with the youngest and least experienced at the bottom and the oldest and most experienced at the top. In reality not all Admirals wished or were able to serve and many had been advanced by the automatic promotion system rather than for their notable competence. The Admiralty was able therefore to reach down the list when occasion demanded to find a competent or willing flag-officer. Nelson, however, had only been a Rear-Admiral of the Blue, the most junior of all flag-officers’ ranks, since February 1797, a mere 15 months before he was given command of the Mediterranean squadron. He really was exceptionally young. Of the other commanding officers in this book, Duckworth was 11 years older than Nelson, Hyde Parker 19, Jervis 23, Duncan 27 and Howe 32 years older when they commanded at the battles described. There were plenty of flag-officers who, if not destined for stardom, had nonetheless enjoyed steady careers and were above him in the list and most of them would have been desperate for such a plum command.
The ships and men in Nelson’s fleet were quite exceptional too. In almost every respect his fleet was the opposite of Duncan’s that had fought the Battle of Camperdown in 1797. Then, Duncan commanded small, old ships of poor quality and many of his captains had question marks over their ability, competence or commitment (p. 135). Nelson’s Mediterranean squadron in 1798, on the other hand, consisted of the finest young commanders that the Navy had to offer together with the finest of its ships, which were well manned and stuffed with provisions. Admiral Jervis, by now known as Earl St Vincent for his heroics at St Vincent and commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean fleet, summed up Nelson’s squadron: ‘The whole of these ships are in excellent order, and so well officered, manned and appointed I am confident they will perform everything to be expected of them.’4
The relatively poor condition of the French fleet was also known. Back in London, Henry Dundas, the Secretary for War, declared, ‘This force, tho’ somewhat inferior in number, is so decidedly superior to that of the Enemy in every other respect, that should the latter be overtaken before they reach Alexandria … the most sanguine prospect of success may reasonably [be] entertained.’5 Duncan had also been burdened with the high expectations of politicians the year before, but at least Nelson had a superb squadron upon which he could base both his tactical planning and his hopes.
Everything was set for a major confrontation and there were high expectations of British success. There was one major problem, however. No more than 65 miles off Toulon, Nelson’s fleet was savagely hurled off station by one of those hideous Mediterranean summer storms, all northerly winds, sharp swells and swirling currents. When, having repaired his ships in Sardinia, he finally clawed his way back within sight of the French coast, the harbour at Toulon was empty. Thirteen ships of the line, 280 transports and 48,662 troops had simply vanished and Nelson had no idea where Napoleon had gone.
The Discovery
It is ironic that whispers suggesting Egypt as Napoleon’s destination had travelled the hundreds of miles to London but had failed to reach Nelson, within earshot of the French fleet. He simply had nothing to work on. Even Ireland, a land in rebellion and its people open allies of the French, was a
possible and reasonable destination; remember that the French had attempted to invade Ireland just 18 months previously. To complicate matters further, Napoleon had decided to sail to Egypt via Malta and his ultimate destination remained a secret even after the fleet had left port.
In 1798, Malta, that tiny island set in the southern Mediterranean between Sicily and the coast of North Africa, was the home of the influential and wealthy Knights of St John. They had, hitherto, remained neutral in the war but retained close links with the French and particularly with the French navy. Indeed, many of the Knights and their paid soldiers were Frenchmen, and many French sailors and naval officers had learned their trade through a system of apprenticeship in the Maltese navy. Moreover, the Knights’ traditional enemies were the Turks and Napoleon was clearly intent on a major conquest of part of the crumbling Ottoman Empire. In that sense, at least, the interests of Napoleon and the Knights were aligned. The Maltese were, therefore, disinclined to fight when he arrived unannounced in their great harbour at Valetta and demanded water for his fleet. They did make a nominal stand and refused his demands but, when Napoleon landed a few troops, the Knights capitulated. They were no longer the fiercely muscled independent force which, two centuries before, had withstood one the greatest sieges in history.9 The great gates of Valetta were opened to Napoleon who not only secured the water he needed for his fleet but robbed the Knights’ vaults of the treasures of centuries. These were duly packed into the hold of L’Orient and the great maritime caravan headed out across the Mediterranean and towards the rising sun.
Nelson, meanwhile, was gathering what information he could, and had slowly begun to form a hunch – and at this stage it really was nothing more than a hunch – that Napoleon was heading for Egypt. He discussed the options with his captains and led them all to his own conclusion that his squadron should head east. They sailed for Alexandria and, just a day south east of Sicily on 22 June, the two fleets passed each other in heavy mist. Nelson refused to follow up a sighting of strange sails because he was convinced that the French were nearly a week ahead. In the blink of an eye he had missed an opportunity to take Napoleon’s vulnerable fleet at sea, encumbered by transports, civilians and stores.
